Azure OpenAI Service: Satya Nadella says new update ‘leap forward’ for Azure AI Foundry — All you need to know

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on April 16 announced new updates for the tech giant's Azure OpenAI Foundry, which he celebrated as a “leap forward in AI reasoning”, in a post on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).

“More big updates to Foundry today: o3 and o4-mini from OpenAI are both simul-shipping, delivering a leap forward in AI reasoning,” Satya Nadella wrote, quoting a post by the Microsoft official X account on the same.

Azure OpenAI Service: New Updates — All You Need to Know

According to the post by Microsoft, the Azure OpenAI Service has been updated to include OpenAI's latest o3 and o4-mini models, which provide key features such as: support for multiple APIs, reasoning summary, multimodality, and full tools support.

The Azure AI Foundry is a website that allows web developers to “customise, host, run, and manage AI-driven applications built in GitHub, Visual Studio, and Copilot Studio, with APIs for all their needs”, according to a description on the application's official website.

'Next-level reasoning AI', says product developer

In a Microsoft blog post detailing the updates, Steve Sweetman, Product Lead for Azure OpenAI Service, announced that Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in Azure AI Foundry and GitHub are now available with the latest iterations in the o-series of OpenAI models: OpenAI o3 and OpenAI o4-mini.

"Both o3 and o4-mini offer significant improvements on quality and safety while supporting the existing features of o1 and o3-mini and delivering comparable or better performance through its integration and support of the newest APIs and reasoning features," according to Sweetman.

What Do The New Updates Introduce?

• Multiple APIs support: Both models are available in Responses API and Chat Completions API with the former supporting seamless integration with multiple tools and enhanced transparency with the reasoning summary as part of the model output.
• Reasoning summary: In the Responses API, both models now support reasoning summary in their output providing more insights into their thinking process. “This enhances the explainability and the effectiveness of the resulting actions and tools that leverage the insights for even better outcomes,” as per Sweetman.
• Multimodality: With enhanced vision analysis capabilities in o3, and new vision support in o4-mini, both models expand their reasoning capabilities to process and analyse visual data, extracting valuable insights and generating comprehensive text outputs in Responses API and Chat Completions API.
• Full tools support includes parallel tool calling: Both models are first reasoning models with full tools support like the mainline models including parallel tool calling. Customers can use these to build the next generation of agentic solutions. This capability is supported in both Responses API and Chat Completions API.

• New innovations in safety: The o-series reasoning models use deliberative alignment, a training strategy that teaches reasoning models safety specifications and trains them to reason explicitly about these specifications before answering. According to Sweetman, “Both o3 and o4-mini feature the next level of safety improvements within the o-series of models so you can use the power of these models knowing these models are pushing the frontiers on safety as well.”
• New audio models available: Azure OpenAI Service has also introduced three powerful new audio models available for deployment today in East US2 on Azure AI Foundry: GPT-4o-Transcribe and GPT-4o-Mini-Transcribe, which are speech-to-text models outperforming previous benchmarks, and GPT-4o-Mini-TTS, a customisable text-to-speech model enabling detailed instructions on speech characteristics.
• A new era in AI reasoning: “Imagine a world where AI reasoning is not just a tool but a partner in innovation. The o3 and o4-mini models are not just upgrades; they are gateways to new possibilities, enabling you to push the boundaries of what AI can achieve,” Sweetman wrote. He added that these tools aid in solving complex problems, creating seamless workflows, or “exploring new frontiers in AI”.